Reading speed of Scripture

In considering the fluency and comprehension levels of readers of Scripture, several factors come into play. First, there is the ability of the reader and existing knowledge of the passage. A fluent reader with familiarity with the Bible is going to read faster than a less fluent reader with little Bible knowledge. Two other factors that need to be accounted for are the translation of the Bible and the genre of the Scripture being read. A “difficult” translation is going to be read at a slower rate. I put difficult in quotes because based on the first criterion a more idiomatic translation can actually be more difficult since it renders a passage in unfamiliar ways forcing the reader to slow down and increasing the error rate. The other factor is the genre. A straight narrative passage is going to be easier to read than a complex epistle, for example.

Here’s a graph of the results from a quick test I did that shows reading fluency purely by measuring words per minute.

The three translations tested were CEV, NIV and ESV and for each translation I read the same Gospel passage and an Epistle passage.

Here are the numbers, if you prefer to look at a spreadsheet:

As we can see from the graph and spreadsheet, the numbers are pretty consistent across the three translations. The noticeable difference is between the genres of Gospel and Epistle. Words per minute was considerably higher across all translations for Gospel than for Epistle.

This was only for one reader (me!) and a much larger sample would be needed to see if these trends are consistent.

Before I close, I want to tie this to two other studies that are currently being done. Tim Bulkeley is trying to look at the orality and the KJV/AV Bibles:

My thought is to address the well-known aural/oral qualities of the KJV/AV and relate that to the possibilities of various oralities/new oralities introduced by the move to electronically mediated communications.

I have sometimes noticed that I have more trouble reading easier translations like the CEV because of my long familiarity with the NIV. So even though the language of an idiomatic translation might be closer to the diction of modern speech in English, I’m actually a faster reader when using the NIV since it is the translation I have used most over the last thirty years. Our family only started using the CEV in 1999 and despite our love for that translation, my wife and I still have a lot of NIV in our heads (and NASB and NKJV for that matter).

This phenomenon is explained by the concept of “chunking” (Yamashita and Ichikawa, 2010) which allows fluent readers to “fill in the blanks” while not having to read every word. This is easier with a well-known translation, but possibly less so with a unfamiliar translation even if it more closely follows natural English syntax.

The second study I heard about at the Pan African Reading for All conference in Gaborone earlier this month. Agatha van Ginkel presented on her study of fluency of L1 Sabaot and L2 English speakers. The study was interesting because the results were counterintuitive. Despite the readers being L2 speakers of English, they were faster readers of English than their native Sabaot. One possible explanation is that Sabaot, a Nilotoc language has really long words. So your word per minute count is necessarily going to be lower. Another explanation proposed by van Ginkel is that Sabaot is agglutinative and has challenging features like vowel harmony that mean that distinct occurrences of any particular word form are likely to be very low.

I’m hoping to apply van Ginkel’s study to a research project at our international church here in South Africa. Her study shows that it’s not easy comparing fluency rates between languages, and it’s further complicated when dealing with a very familiar text like the Bible. My particular interest is in how the use of overhead projections of the Scripture help or hinder the comprehension of Scripture readings during the liturgy. If the reader from the pulpit is reading at a rate faster than that of the listeners, do they follow the reader or rely on the written text being projected? And what happens when the reader and the projection don’t match, that is, for example NIV is being read but ESV is being displayed. Another factor to look at would be whether worshipers are using their own Bible, possibly in another language to scaffold the reading experience.